Let's Talk Movies #33: Star Wars: Jabba Rising...Captain America Trumps China...and MORE!

[PeterG]

Tonight I watched Run Silent, Run Deep (1958), a WWII drama starring Clark Gable and Burt Lancaster. I thought it was a really well made movie, about an American submarine crew with a captain (Gable) out for revenge on a sub which destroyed Gable's previous submarine (and killed most of his crew). It has a high rating at imdb.com (7.4), but received zero Oscar nominations (or any other type of nomination for that matter) even though the direction and story are great and it's a good looking filming with good special effects as well as underwater cinematography. Not to mention all the performances which also include Jack Warden and Don Rickles, who I didn't know was a dramatic actor earlier in his career. Gable and Lancaster are at the top of their game, playing well off of each other. I've only seen Gable in Gone With The Wind, so I should check out more of his movies. Last note for this movie is that it was directed by Robert Wise, who was nominated for best director Citizen Kane and I Want To Live! as well as two others for which he won best director: West Side Story and The Sound of Music. Perhaps you have heard of them.

I think the script is loved more for the banter than for the narrative.

Interesting, makes me re-think the worthiness of the screenplay for this. I gave credit for the plus-side of the dialogue to the delivery and chemistry of Redford and Newman. But as good as two actors are, if they're given drivel to recite, you have to be pretty incredible to make that work.

I actually want to see xXx, it looks like a mess, but a fun mess. And I mean, Toni Collette is in it.

It's a date.

 

[Buzz]

Rogue One has officially crossed $1b in ticket sales!

 

[Vash01]

Rogue One has officially crossed $1b in ticket sales!

I still have to see it. This weekend I was busy watching FS.

 

[Jay42]

Tonight I watched Run Silent, Run Deep (1958), a WWII drama starring Clark Gable and Burt Lancaster. I thought it was a really well made movie, about an American submarine crew with a captain (Gable) out for revenge on a sub which destroyed Gable's previous submarine (and killed most of his crew). It has a high rating at imdb.com (7.4), but received zero Oscar nominations (or any other type of nomination for that matter) even though the direction and story are great and it's a good looking filming with good special effects as well as underwater cinematography. Not to mention all the performances which also include Jack Warden and Don Rickles, who I didn't know was a dramatic actor earlier in his career. Gable and Lancaster are at the top of their game, playing well off of each other. I've only seen Gable in Gone With The Wind, so I should check out more of his movies. Last note for this movie is that it was directed by Robert Wise, who was nominated for best director Citizen Kane and I Want To Live! as well as two others for which he won best director: West Side Story and The Sound of Music. Perhaps you have heard of them.

I haven't seen a ton of Clark Gable movies but I have enjoyed the ones that I have. Mogambo, which was also Grace Kelly's breakout role is really good, Ava Gardner is in it as well. Wife vs. Secretary is decent, so is Manhattan Melodrama, which was one of Myrna Loy's breakthrough roles (1934 was a big year for her). It Happened One Night is supposed to be really good, Claudette Colbert won her Oscar for it, but even though I've owned it for nearly a year I haven't actually watched it yet. The Hucksters is good, it was Deborah Kerr's first role after coming over from the UK and Ava Gardner has a smaller part in it too.

It's a date.

Sounds good .

 

[Aussie Willy]

I have just joined up to Netflix. Lots more movie watching to do.

 

[emason]

It Happened One Night didn't just win an Oscar for Colbert; it was the first movie to win the Oscar Grand Slam: picture, director, screenplay, actor, actress.

eta: Mogambo is a remake, I believe, of Red Dust. Red Dust was Gable, Jean Harlow, and, if I recall correctly, Mary Astor. Jean Harlow = Ava Gardner, Mary Astor = Grace Kelly.

 

[watchthis!!]

7 musicals to check out if you enjoyed La La Land or plan on seeing it
http://entertainment.ie/cinema/news...ed-La-La-Land-or-plan-on-seeing-it/389694.htm

Their seven suggestions:

An American In Paris
On The Town
A Star Is Born (1954 version)
The Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musicals – Swing Time, Top Hat, Shall We Dance?
West Side Story
Moulin Rouge!
Singin' In The Rain

Speaking of Boy George, I always dreamed about adapting the musical Taboo into a film. It has one of my favorite Broadway scores of all time.

Cool. I'll look for that.

 

[Jay42]

It Happened One Night didn't just win an Oscar for Colbert; it was the first movie to win the Oscar Grand Slam: picture, director, screenplay, actor, actress.

eta: Mogambo is a remake, I believe, of Red Dust. Red Dust was Gable, Jean Harlow, and, if I recall correctly, Mary Astor. Jean Harlow = Ava Gardner, Mary Astor = Grace Kelly.

I forgot It Happened One Night won all the Oscars. I just remembered reading the story about how Claudette Colbert was sure she would lose so she wasn't at the ceremony and they had to get her from the train station because she was going out of town. I should really just watch it .

7 musicals to check out if you enjoyed La La Land or plan on seeing it
http://entertainment.ie/cinema/news...ed-La-La-Land-or-plan-on-seeing-it/389694.htm

Their seven suggestions:

An American In Paris
On The Town
A Star Is Born (1954 version)
The Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musicals – Swing Time, Top Hat, Shall We Dance?
West Side Story
Moulin Rouge!
Singin' In The Rain

I've seen all of these except On The Town, it's been at least 10-12 years since I've seen An American In Paris though, I think my mom has those 2. I should borrow them while she's out of town this week.

 

[PeterG]

I watched Oculus tonight, I felt it had a good story to it, very interesting premise but...the ending was so flat! I had to re-watch the ending credits to see if there was something after all the credits had finished rolling. It just really left me with a "is that it"?? feeling. I'm still surprised it ended in such a basic way. Which is frustrating as I liked all the rest of it so much. It's a two-person story, with Karen Gillan and Brenton Thwaites playing siblings who endured a horrific experience as children and return to the place where it all happened in an attempt to fix something majorly problematic. Both give great performances and their game plan is both detailed and intelligent, but they are up against challenges that might not be something which can be dealt with by just the two of them. If you like stories which are as smart as they are scary, give this one a go and enjoy the two strong leads. But don't expect a big ending!

I haven't seen a ton of Clark Gable movies but I have enjoyed the ones that I have. Mogambo, which was also Grace Kelly's breakout role is really good, Ava Gardner is in it as well. Wife vs. Secretary is decent, so is Manhattan Melodrama, which was one of Myrna Loy's breakthrough roles (1934 was a big year for her). It Happened One Night is supposed to be really good, Claudette Colbert won her Oscar for it, but even though I've owned it for nearly a year I haven't actually watched it yet. The Hucksters is good, it was Deborah Kerr's first role after coming over from the UK and Ava Gardner has a smaller part in it too.

Thanks, I've added all these titles to my list. Except for The Hucksters, no library around here holds this title.

 

[Aussie Willy]

Have to watch this SNL skit about La La Land - hilarious

 

[watchthis!!]

Queen: Days of our Lives is a two-part documentary about the British rock band, with part one covering their beginning/the 70's and part two is about the 80's and onwards. I'm not a major league Queen fan, but I saw this DVD at the library and thought I'd see if it was worth watching. And it was amazing! I didn't bother to watch each part separately, but was glued to the screen from start to finish. They seem to cover anything a fan (even a casual fan) would want to know in a very forthcoming and interesting manner. Would have liked to see more performances over interviews and archival footage, but there's lots of Queen live DVD's out there, so maybe I should look for one of them. Plus this DVD has a bunch of music videos I've yet to watch as extras. Disappointing that the "I Want To Break Free" video basically killed their career in America. That's the one where they are all in drag, and I learned from this documentary that part of the idea for that video was a bit of a tip of the hat to Coronation Street and the significance it plays British culture. And that America didn't get the reference or the sly wink of what the guys were doing and instead reacted in a knee-jerk way to a rock band in drag. So because of this, they never regained their previous fame in America, all while doing incredibly well as in the U.K. as well as other parts of the world. Freddie Mercury said he wouldn't tour again in America until they had enough success their to warrant it, but that never happened. So Queen toured the other parts of the world and North America lost out. I never got to see them live, but the live clips they showed here were amazing. There are outtakes on the DVD for certain parts of their career that didn't make the final cut. Looking forward to watching this excerpts tonight or tomorrow.

The trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07ULN7EaHGQ

P.S. When I looked for the trailer, I see that both parts of this documentary are there in full. If you watch it, let me know what you think

 

[Artistic Skaters]

There is a movie coming out soon I was planning on seeing called "A Dog's Purpose" but not anymore. There is a disturbing video of a dog handler trying to force a scared German Shepard into a pool. It is a differcult video to watch because the animal is clearly terrified.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=csLiYr5OGbg

There was a response to the charges from the producer in yesterday's news. Kind of long article, but the summary is that two actions should never have happened & were supposed to be stopped & reported by the AHA. But he also said they reviewed all the footage & the video was edited to make it look worse, even using computer generated images of the dog; & questioned why it would not be reported as soon as it happened if their true concern was the dog's well being.

*** Gavin Polone on 'A Dog's Purpose' Outcry, What Really Happened and Who's to Blame :
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/ne...urpose-outcry-what-happened-whos-blame-967160

The film's producer (and a THR columnist) explains the controversial video showing alleged on-set abuse, the precautions that were taken, the failure of a watchdog group and PETA's role in sensationalizing the scandal to serve its own cause.

Like you, I’m sure, I was appalled when I saw the video, shot on the set of A Dog’s Purpose in Winnipeg in October 2015, of a dog trainer trying to coerce a frightened German Shepard into a pool. Unlike you, the terrible feeling engendered by that video was heightened for me because I am the producer of that film and because much of my identity is fused with the belief that I am a lover and defender of animals and their welfare.

I have participated in, helped pay for and written in this publication about animal welfare causes. My will is set up so that all I have shall be donated to charities benefiting animals when I die. I am a vegan who has fewer close friends than most and no relatives with whom I speak regularly. The most consistent and closest relationships I’ve had throughout my life have been with animals.

Lasse Hallstrom directed this film & also directed Hachi: A Dog's Tale, another movie for animal lovers. I do agree with many of the points Polone makes about PETA, so I will have to give some more thought to this whole scandal.

 

[Aussie Willy]

Thought I would post this nice article with Saroo Brierley who the film Lion is based on

http://www.smh.com.au/comment/saroo...y-nominated-for-an-oscar-20170124-gtxx0b.html

 

[PeterG]

Trailers For Movies Released 2017-01-27th
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLuI4-fSHhipRlRxBxKwPXyBsWfQTvC5rE

Wow, a lot of good movies are coming out this week! I almost had a clean sweep of every single title going onto my To See list. And the two that didn't make it might end up being movies I see if I hear enough good things about them. Those two are Lost in Florence, which looks like a good movie, but the violent sports aspect in this romance made me iffy. And Kung Fu Yoga looks to be the first China/Bollywood movie I'm aware of. If you like silly action movies, this one might just hit the right spot for you.

As for the other releases, I Am Michael looks so good that I'm wondering why it didn't get a limited release in December in order to qualify for Oscar nods. Maybe the movie is so-so but has a great trailer? I just know I really want to see it. Both The Daughter and Get The Girl are movies which I'm unsure as to what they're about, but the trailers drew me in so much, I have to see the movies now to get the whole story. And all three foreign films look really good, all in very different ways. Good week for world cinema. For ALL cinema, it looks like.


Jan. 27th - Resident Evil: The Final Chapter (Wide) - Action with Milla Jovovich and Ali Larter

Jan. 27th - A Dog’s Purpose (Wide) – Adventure comedy with Britt Robertson, Dennis Quaid, Josh Gad an Peggy Litpon

Jan. 27th - I Am Michael (Limited) – Drama with Zachary Quinto, James Franco, Emma Roberts, Lesley Ann Warren and Daryl Hannah

Jan. 27th - Sophie and the Rising Sun (Limited) – Drama with Julianne Nicholson, Margo Martindale and Diane Ladd

Jan. 27th - The Daughter (Limited) – Australian drama with Geoffrey Rush, Sam Neill and Miranda Otto

Jan. 26th - Get the Girl (Limited) – Action comedy with a new cast. From imdb.com: “A wealthy young man is conned into staging a fake kidnapping in order to be a hero and win the affection of a girl he's madly in love with. But when one of the hired kidnappers is accidentally killed during the charade, he's forced to actually save her life while not revealing that it's been a ruse all along.”

Jan. 27th - Lost in Florence (Limited) - Romance with a new cast. From imdb.com: “Eric Lazard is a heartbroken former college football star who gets involved in a dangerous Florentine sport and a local woman, Stephanie, while visiting his cousin Anna, who lives in Italy and teaches the Italian language to foreigners.”

Jan. 27th - Kung Fu Yoga (Limited) – Chinese action adventure comedy with Jackie Chan

Jan. 27th – Un Padre No Tan Padre (Limited) – Mexican comedy. From imdb.com: “When a good old fashioned Mexican patriarch gets expelled from his retirement home, his younger son Francisco takes him in. Don Servando is about to find out the truth about his son and his way of living.”

Jan. 27th - Paris 05:59: Théo & Hugo (Limited) – French romantic drama. From imdb.com: “Theo and Hugo meet each other in a sex club in Paris. After building a special connection while having sex, they meet outside the club where they realize they had unprotected sex. Since one of them is HIV positive, they go to the hospital to get checked and start the required treatment. You see the boys spend the night together and fall in love after this incident.”

Jan. 27th - The Salesman (Limited) – Iranian thriller. From imdb.com: “Forushande (The Salesman) is the story of a couple whose relationship begins to turn sour during their performance of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman.”

And going into wide release this week after limited release in December:

Jan. 27th - Gold (Wide) – Adventure thriller with Bryce Dallas Howard, Matthew McConaughey, Bruce Greenwood, Corey Stoll and Stacy Keach

 

[MacMadame]

I didn't think that the dog was "clearly" terrified. He just seemed confused and annoyed. I have taken my son's dog swimming. Our dog *loves* to swim but once in a while he balks and it looks just like that. Since we don't care if he swims or not (no deadlines or movie footage is at stake), we just wait and 2 seconds later he's frolicking in the water like nothing happened.

And PETA sucks and has multiple hidden agendas. They run animal shelters with incredibly high kill rates because they think a pet is better off dead than in a loving home. They steal other people's pets and claim they were running around loose and then they kill them before their owners can come get them. They frequently created misleading videos and otherwise lie to further their agenda of getting rid of all pets. So they can go **** themselves.

That said, the AHS has been criticized in the past for being too loose with how animals are treated on the set. If PETA didn't have a hidden agenda of removing all animals from the movies and getting rid of all pets, they could have maybe used this footage to improve that situation. Which would be the right thing to do IMO. Waiting until the movie was about to be released to say anything so they got the maximum publicity was not.

 

[Jay42]

I watched Oculus tonight, I felt it had a good story to it, very interesting premise but...the ending was so flat! I had to re-watch the ending credits to see if there was something after all the credits had finished rolling. It just really left me with a "is that it"?? feeling. I'm still surprised it ended in such a basic way. Which is frustrating as I liked all the rest of it so much. It's a two-person story, with Karen Gillan and Brenton Thwaites playing siblings who endured a horrific experience as children and return to the place where it all happened in an attempt to fix something majorly problematic. Both give great performances and their game plan is both detailed and intelligent, but they are up against challenges that might not be something which can be dealt with by just the two of them. If you like stories which are as smart as they are scary, give this one a go and enjoy the two strong leads. But don't expect a big ending!



Thanks, I've added all these titles to my list. Except for The Hucksters, no library around here holds this title.

I keep going back and forth on watching Oculus, I am a big fan of Karen Gillan, but I'm not a fan of horror movies.

I only got The Hucksters because it was a cheap import on Amazon when the dollar was still close to par. I'm not surprised none of your libraries have it.

 

[PeterG]

I keep going back and forth on watching Oculus, I am a big fan of Karen Gillan, but I'm not a fan of horror movies.

I had never heard of Gillan before this movie. Her character in Oculus is very smart and very compenent and has a few sections of dialogue that would be a challenge in a lesser actor's hands. As for the movie itself, I'd say it's WAY close to something like Nicole Kidman's The Others than any slasher flick. It's definitely more "eerie" than "blood and guts", that's for sure.

I didn't think that the dog was "clearly" terrified. He just seemed confused and annoyed. I have taken my son's dog swimming. Our dog *loves* to swim but once in a while he balks and it looks just like that. Since we don't care if he swims or not (no deadlines or movie footage is at stake), we just wait and 2 seconds later he's frolicking in the water like nothing happened.

And PETA sucks and has multiple hidden agendas. They run animal shelters with incredibly high kill rates because they think a pet is better off dead than in a loving home. They steal other people's pets and claim they were running around loose and then they kill them before their owners can come get them. They frequently created misleading videos and otherwise lie to further their agenda of getting rid of all pets. So they can go **** themselves.

That said, the AHS has been criticized in the past for being too loose with how animals are treated on the set. If PETA didn't have a hidden agenda of removing all animals from the movies and getting rid of all pets, they could have maybe used this footage to improve that situation. Which would be the right thing to do IMO. Waiting until the movie was about to be released to say anything so they got the maximum publicity was not.

Interesting info. I'm open to hearing all sides to the story about how animals were treated in A Dog's Purpose. I had assumed that there would be strict supervision of how animals were treated on all movie sets these days, so if something really went wrong, there would be hell to pay. I hadn't heard that the AHS were lax on movie sets though, that's disturbing to hear.

As for PETA stealing pets and killing them before their owners could get to them...crazy! Why would they do that? I can't see how it could serve any purpose other than to create major public backlash towards their organization.

Getting back to the movie A Dog's Purpose, I'm wondering if footage was leaked to the media so that there would be so much talk about this movie that people who never know that this movie was even coming out would now know all about it. The trailer looks really good. So I'm wondering if this was a weird publicity tactic...

 

[VGThuy]

I watched Jackie and I was really ready to like it or even love it. I wanted it to be a great character study of a person whose public persona preceded the real woman, and how someone would act after dealing with the traumatic event of having her husband shot in front of her, and who happened to be President and everything that entailed. Unfortunately, I ended up agreeing with a lot of what @Vash01 had to say about it. In the end, I realized I really didn't care that much even though I so wanted to.

Spoiler

The problem I had with the movie was that it seemed to be about form over substance, which can be an effective storytelling tool in film quite honestly. That said, in this film, I felt the way the movie was shot, the editing, the score, and all the close-ups worked against it as I found the directorial choices to really distract me and take me out of it. There was a series of scenes in the middle that were so cut and pasted that I was wondering if this whole movie would be shot like this and whether longer takes would have been much more effective in giving the audience the necessary emotion to get Jackie the person. I found the film to be trying too hard to be filmed in a very stylish way to avoid being a run-of-the-mill biopic that the style took away from the subject matter. I sort of felt the same way with David Fincher's heavy-handed directing in Gone Girl where I felt his hip style and Trent Reznor score actually worked against it unlike The Social Network.

As for the performances, I found all the scenes with Billy Crudup to be incredibly awkward and not in the way the film intended it to be. Crudup didn't seem to be really in this film and he just gave a really uneasy and awkward vibe that was beyond the character feeling awkward around Jackie. The ultra close-up of both actors made me actually think they were not really into the characters they were playing. Natalie Portman didn't seem quite there in those scenes either. She was trying to hard to give some sort of vibe that it seemed like they were doing an actor's workshop gone wrong more than anything. Peter Sarsgaard, who I usually enjoy, seemed very Peter Sarsgaard in this film rather than Bobby Kennedy. Greta Gerwig seemed to be the only person playing a fully-fleshed character but she had almost nothing to do.

As for Natalie Portman, I found her performance to be very uneven. There were scenes in which she totally worked and I thought "I can see her winning an award for this" and others where I felt she was so incredibly mannered and awkward and trying too hard. I understand Jackie was very mannered and worked hard to control her public persona, but I think Natalie Portman's acting didn't elevate that at all since she has similar limitations in other roles I've seen. In the end, I couldn't help but think what a vanity project this was for her...which would have been satisfying since Jackie herself talks about vanity throughout the film, but the way the film executed it was pretty flat. About her accent, I don't know too much about Jackie's actual accent except from what I've seen of other actresses playing her (with varying results), and though I think people put too much stock in accents to analyze a performance, I found Natalie Portman's Jackie accent to be a really weird hybrid of a stereotypical Massachusetts accent and Natalie's own voice. Sure it avoided the cartoon portrayal, but it didn't seem like a real accent at all. Maybe I'm wrong and that's how Jackie actually sounded, but I doubt it.

I don't know how LBJ and Ladybird Johnson were during the days following the assassination, but this movie came off as trying way too hard to create conflict and an antagonist for Jackie and Bobby that they came off as real cartoon villains in their small ways. I mean having Ladybird Johnson discuss decoration and the color of curtains when Jackie was still in the house about to leave for the last time was really borderline character assassination (unless that really happened).

Isabelle Huppert by far gave the superior performance. What she gave in every shot of that movie was nothing short of a masterful and consistently in-tuned and on point performance. However, I appreciate all the effort Natalie Portman expended.

 

[Aussie Willy]

For those wanting to know about the locations in Lion, here is an article that shows the spots they filmed

 

[MacMadame]

As for PETA stealing pets and killing them before their owners could get to them...crazy! Why would they do that? I can't see how it could serve any purpose other than to create major public backlash towards their organization.

It helps if you realize that they aren't an animal welfare organization but an animal rights organization.

They believe animals weren't put on this earth to be property of humans. The problem with that is that domestic animals absolutely were bred to be companions to humans and have incredible rough lives when forced to live on their own. It also denies the really strong bond between humans and their pets.

You can google about the pet killing and there is a FB group called PetaKillsAnimals that has links to articles about how high the kill rate is in their shelters if you want to know more about it.

 

[watchthis!!]

Entertainment Weekly did a short list a while back about women in movies, specifically movies where a woman (or women) were the lead character(s). (They did not include movies like Titanic or Star Wars: The Force Awakens where the female character was a co-lead of the movie.) Only eight of the top 100 biggest worldwide hits had women as the lead character. Four of those eight were Katniss Everdeen. Here are those eight movies (with their place in the top 100 noted first):

#9 - Frozen (1.28 billion)
#51 - The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (865 million)
#52 - Inside Out – Amy Poehler as the lead (857.4 million)
#70 - Maleficent (758.5 million)
#73 - The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part One (755.4 million)
#82 - Gravity (723.2 million)
#91 - The Hunger Games (694.4 million)
#102 - The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part Two (653.4 million) – must have been knocked out of the top 100 by a newer movie

 

[Jay42]

I had never heard of Gillan before this movie. Her character in Oculus is very smart and very compenent and has a few sections of dialogue that would be a challenge in a lesser actor's hands. As for the movie itself, I'd say it's WAY close to something like Nicole Kidman's The Others than any slasher flick. It's definitely more "eerie" than "blood and guts", that's for sure.

Her big break was in Doctor Who, which I am a massive fan of and she was frequently amazing in. She also plays Nebula in Guardians of the Galaxy. She's been moving into writing and directing as well. She's done a couple of shorts and she's directing her first feature length movie now.

I liked The Others, I can do eerie. I'm just super jumpy as a rule so I tend to avoid most horror because I know how easy I am to scare.

 

[PeterG]

The Shock Doctrine is a 2009 documentary based on the Naomi Klein book of the same name. The main theme of the movie is around the idea that those in power either create or take advantage of disaster situations so as to push through unpopular laws and changes while the citizens are physically and psychologically overwhelmed and therefore lacking the ability to fight back about the changes being forced through the political process. I found this to be a very well-made film, but also very overwhelming in terms of the subject matter.

One personal critique is that I find Klein to be an amazing speaker and the filmmaker of this documentary uses very few pieces of the lectures she gives on this topic. A narrator is used instead, speaking over various film footage. I found this narrator to be a much less dynamic speaker than Klein herself. So often I wished we could have just seen a filmed version of Klein’s entire speech. I wish Klein's speech could have been included, it would have made an amazing DVD feature. I do recommend this one if you’re a documentary fan and you are interested in this sort of topic.

 

[Artistic Skaters]

As for PETA stealing pets and killing them before their owners could get to them...crazy! Why would they do that? I can't see how it could serve any purpose other than to create major public backlash towards their organization.

Getting back to the movie A Dog's Purpose, I'm wondering if footage was leaked to the media so that there would be so much talk about this movie that people who never know that this movie was even coming out would now know all about it. The trailer looks really good. So I'm wondering if this was a weird publicity tactic...

PETA started out in suburban MD freeing the test monkeys & pushing public policy. But then they moved to the VA coast & got into the kill shelter business. ITA with MacMadame & don't know how they remain such a big fundraiser when they clearly do harm to perfectly healthy dogs & cats. They have been fined for euthanizing dogs the same day against state law. Workers have been charged for driving around putting animal carcasses in dumpsters rather than properly disposing of them. Workers also collect animals with assurances they will be rehomed to good homes & then euthanize them. They euthanize something like 80% & rehome 1%. It's not due to them only having sick/disabled animals as PETA claims when numerous vets have checked & autopsied so many & found them to be healthy. VA has passed new laws in an effort to better regulate shelters like PETA.

But back to the movie, I really don't think any director or producer would do something like this as a publicity stunt when it's tied so directly to their reputation. It's a movie based on a popular book, so many are already familiar with it. Instead someone who may or may not be affiliated with PETA wanted to make money & sold the footage for release conveniently in conjunction with the movie opening & most likely a pre-planned PETA boycott.

 

[watchthis!!]

Nerve (Dave Franco and Emma Roberts) is a great popcorn movie. The direction is both edgy yet not too dark, which matches well with a script which has a message that could come across very heavy-handed in the hands of different directors. The audience probably weren’t even aware that they just got a lesson in personal responsibility in a world of digital distancing...from seemingly everything (and everyone). The directors have worked together on the TV series Catfish as well as a few of the Paranormal Activity movies. Looking forward to seeing what they do next.

Trailer for Nerve:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AX1BTiHzq-I

 

[Aussie Willy]

Here is a musical quiz - name the musicals by a screen shot. I got 47 out of 49.

BTW - say Edge of Seventeen tonight. Really enjoyed it. Hailee Steinfeld was very good. Not surprised she is getting award nominations. But the story was very well written and it had great humour. Enjoyed it very much.

 

[Jay42]

Here is a musical quiz - name the musicals by a screen shot. I got 47 out of 49.

I got 48 out of 49 but there was a bunch of them where I only knew the right answer because I was familiar with the other movies listed but I hadn't seen the one that was actually right.

I do find it odd that the picture they used for Once was from when Arthur Darvill was in the play on Broadway. That's the only reason I got that one right.

 

[Vash01]

Here is a musical quiz - name the musicals by a screen shot. I got 47 out of 49.

BTW - say Edge of Seventeen tonight. Really enjoyed it. Hailee Steinfeld was very good. Not surprised she is getting award nominations. But the story was very well written and it had great humour. Enjoyed it very much.

I got only 45

 

[VGThuy]

Here is a musical quiz - name the musicals by a screen shot. I got 47 out of 49.

BTW - say Edge of Seventeen tonight. Really enjoyed it. Hailee Steinfeld was very good. Not surprised she is getting award nominations. But the story was very well written and it had great humour. Enjoyed it very much.

I got them all right, but there were like 2 or 3 I never heard of before, but I was able to use the process of elimination to get the right answer because I was familiar with the other choices. Some of the pictures they used were downright wrong. Like for the picture they used for All That Jazz wasn't from the film but rather it looked like a picture of some random stage production of Chicago. The pictures they used for The Who's Tommy and Once didn't seem to be from the films themselves but the stage adaptations.

 

[PeterG]

I got them all right as well, done the same way as @VIETgrlTerifa ... process of elimination. The one I was most likely to get wrong was

Spoiler

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg

when I just looked at the picture long enough to see that the answer was right there surrounding the main character.

ETA: The quiz made me aware of Sunshine on Leith, I love George MacKay, so I'm definitely going to hunt down this one.